


Battle Royal, or Ten drabbles about Bernard and Viggo

by abundantlyqueer



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Drabble, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-10-06
Updated: 2004-10-06
Packaged: 2017-10-13 01:13:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/131155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abundantlyqueer/pseuds/abundantlyqueer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>pron for iPod payment.</p><p>I suspect this is not at all what she meant; it's certainly not what I sat down to write, and I have no idea what it means.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Battle Royal, or Ten drabbles about Bernard and Viggo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vegetariansushi](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=vegetariansushi).



> pron for iPod payment.
> 
> I suspect this is not at all what she meant; it's certainly not what I sat down to write, and I have no idea what it means.

  
1.  
The first time Bernard sees Viggo - _Aragorn_ , really, as far as hair and makeup are concerned at least – Viggo's got Orlando Bloom in a head-lock and is attempting to shove a piece of orange peel down the back of his tee shirt. Orlando is struggling hard enough that Viggo has to keep resetting his balance, his dirty moccasin boots slipping in the dust.  
"You fucking fucker," Orlando yells. "You fucking fucking fucker."  
Viggo grins, his uneven teeth startling in his black-smudged face. He glances in Bernard's direction, and Bernard's heart lurches at the thin clear blue of Viggo's eyes.  
2.  
The second time Bernard sees Viggo, Viggo's holding Elijah Wood upside down and is sort of hitching him up and down, apparently trying to shake something loose. Elijah is laughing hysterically, clutching at Viggo's hands where they're interlocked around Elijah's hips. His laughter turns to shrieks of mirth when Viggo orders Orlando to help with the search. Orlando, vivid with excitement, shoves his fingers into Elijah's jeans pockets.  
Bernard deduces two things from these observations. One is that Orlando Bloom is a traitorous trollop, and the other is that Viggo is used to doing whatever he bleeding well feels like.  
3.  
Bernard sits on Viggo's porch drinking thin beer until he needs to piss. There's an inordinate amount of laughing and moaning coming from inside the bathroom. Bernard bangs on the door with the side of his fist.  
"Here, come on. Yeh can do that anywhere, and I need to piss!"  
"Buggerin' hell," Bernard hears, in Billy Boyd's unmistakable accent. "Jus' my buggerin' luck."  
The door opens; Elijah, Billy, and Dom Monaghan tumble out, all three in hysterics. Billy's blushing beet red, and Elijah's wiping his mouth with his fingers.  
"Sorry, hobbit pile," Elijah says guilelessly.  
"Character development exercise," Dom deadpans.  
4.  
"Americans are full o'shite," Bernard says.  
The pub is a corrugated iron shack with a tarpaper roof. Bernard's sitting on a couch that smells like wet dog, with Dom on one side and Sean Bean on the other. The three of them contemplate Viggo across a scarred and unstable coffee table covered in empty glasses and over-flowing ashtrays. Viggo sips the top off his almost overflowing pint.  
"You could at least object when you're being insulted," Bernard says.  
"I didn't realize I was being insulted."  
"You didn't realize 'full o'shite' was an insult?"  
"I didn't realize I was considered American."  
5.  
"Sorry sod," Bernard says, referring to Theoden. "What a life, eh? Gathering dust while his son's killed and his nephew is banished and his niece is sexually harassed. And he wakes up just in time to get killed in battle while the kids cover themselves in glory. What a life."  
"That's what fatherhood is," Viggo says, barely moving his thin lips enough to shape the words intelligibly. "You lose your children, or you're surpassed by them … or both."  
Bernard finds himself filled with a kind of fear for Viggo, who seems to know so much and resent so little.  
6.  
"I stand in precisely the same relation to you that Orlando does to me," Viggo says.  
He's pulled the brim of his hat down, but the campfire smears red and gold into the hollows under his cheekbones.  
"Younger an' better lookin', y'mean?" Bernard says wryly.  
"A little off balance, not sure what I should say, not sure if I'm making a fool of myself."  
Bernard stares, but Viggo's gaze refuses to meet his. Something in the heart of the fire flares up and then falls away into entropy, sending a ribbon of yellow-white wood sparks streaming up into the dark.  
7.  
As first kisses go, it's not romantic. The day is too bright, sunlight thrown harshly back by the pale rock. The wind is thin, the air cutting with quarry dust. Viggo's mouth is sour from too much coffee and not enough sleep.  
"I don't know what I'm doin' here," Bernard says crossly, when he slips one arm around Viggo's waist and pulls him in closer.  
Viggo lifts his chin haughtily, his mouth setting in an attitude of lordly arrogance, and that's what decides Bernard. He leans in, and his beard snags counterweavewise against Viggo's scruff, and Viggo's mouth breaks open.  
8.  
Viggo naked is thinner than Bernard expected: hound thin, whip thin, starved because he doesn't want to eat food that belongs to this world, this age. There's nothing here that Bernard's hands can confuse with a woman's body, no ease of flesh, no compassion of skin. The hard cords of sinew standing up from the long lean lines of muscle make Bernard think of his father, his brother. These things are not sexual. Why, then, does the rank smoke smell of Viggo's skin make Bernard's body ache? Why does Viggo seem more alien, more other, than any woman ever has?  
9.  
"Oh Christ," Bernard pleads at the moment their bodies lock together, and the sensation is so strange that it's long minutes before he can appreciate that it is _good_ , better than good.  
Viggo lifts his head, the sweat dark tangles of his hair swaying in the low lamplight, and he looks at Bernard over the sharp curve of his own tanned shoulder. His eyes are blasted, dark with desire, and his expression is too open, too raw, too supplicating to belong on Viggo's face.  
"I'm too old to be doing something like this for the first time," Bernard laughs breathlessly.  
10.  
Viggo keeps picking and plucking at the edges of Bernard's costume, scuffing dirt onto his boots, twitching and smirking while Bernard's trying to pay attention to Peter.  
"I suppose if I had pigtails you'd pull them," Bernard says, batting at his hand.  
Viggo grins.  
"Get out of it," Bernard laughs.  
"Dom! Run!" Viggo suddenly yells, lunging at Dom in a flurry of hair and surcoat skirts.  
Dom's frozen in shock for a second, but then he drops his Styrofoam coffee cup where he stands and takes off at a headlong sprint, Viggo in careening pursuit and shrieking like a banshee.  



End file.
